


Reality of Fiction

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-21
Updated: 2012-12-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 21:49:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/602439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A meta-textual exploration of the boundaries of fiction and reality, and all our love for a certain detective and his doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reality of Fiction

**Author's Note:**

> I welcome any comments, etc. This is a bit wanky, but there you go. I hope someone gets something out of this. :)

They say if someone's name lives on, they will never truly die. That as long as their name remains on people's lips - their image in their mind, their memory in their heart - the person will be immortal. This kind of life, this existence in the shouts and whispers of the world, on papers written and past from one person to another, this existence is ephemeral and beautiful but ultimately flawed.

It's not enough for someone's name to be spoken. It's not enough for people to pass their deeds along, held aloft like a flaming torch. The wind when it blows is strong enough to take their being away, blowing the essence of the one remembered away like smoke from the once-lit torch, extinguished and no longer warming anything. It's not enough to just remember, and in the remembering let the one now gone's name lie limply and dead on the tongue, on the page, on the screen.

For life, you need stories. In each person's living is their story told, tales of infinite banality and wonder alike, spooling out into the future. In people's hearts, it is those who never truly lived that shine the brightest. Those who are just beings of ink and word, never given a flesh and blood body. Those whose essence are taken up and danced into life by others, in fine garb or poor rags.

It's those who live in the hearts of so many, those who new stories are written about, those for whom new lives are constantly created, lived and ended that go on so brightly. Their names dance in the lips of young and old alike, turning and weaving around stories both new and ancient, each breath given to them, devoted to their being bringing them one step closer to life.

Those spirits that are the oldest have had the promise of true life snatched away all too many times to be excited by the prospect of awakening from their sleepy state, in beds of paper with blankets of ink. As such they may never rise, being too old and too comfortable in their lives being passed from one mind to another. All bar two, that is. In their remembering they are given adventures and mystery, chases and dangers, sorrow and joy so strong and so much fervour that their spirits have not been damped by the years that have rolled over their heads. It is these two who are given life in story after story, whose names are taken up by person after person and given heed in every age imaginable, from the long-lost past to the far-flung future. They sing and love and hate and play and work over and over again, being whirred from person to person in an unimaginably large, never ending dance. Together they are dressed in robes of the most flowing silk and rags of the roughest linen, together they give their lives for their great quest, for a perfect stranger and for each other. The story tears on and on, the momentum now so great that even had someone wanted to stop it they would be unable. It uses gallons of ink, takes hours of people's lives, every moment growing interchangeability brighter. Straining at the barrier of truth and fiction, pushing at that insurmountable impediment to the characters escaping and beginning to dance their own tune, write their own story.

Until one day, when a small child begins to relate a story overheard when they should have been sleeping. A story about a detective and his faithful doctor...

 

"Where the devil are we, Holmes?"  
"Well, let us take stock of the facts we have available..."


End file.
